The Chieftain's Random Musings Thread

The_Chieftain: Ok. The question is a good one, and it actually is on my list of subjects to cover in a near-future Hatch article.   The upshot is that there is a difference between the bottom line as viewed by th folks at the higher end, and those who are actually doing the fighting. I have documents from Fifth Army to the US basically saying “keep the 75s, we want every 76mm tank you can send.”    The fighting men wanted a point-and shoot weapon. I see enemy tank. I point gun at enemy tank. Enemy tank goes boom. And with good reason. Without that gun, they were forced to take alternate measures like flanking, suppressing, trick shots, or whatever else.   The folks in DC or London, though, are looking at a map of the world, and they realize that they got all the way from Casablanca to somewhere around Rome, quite a few kilometers, for the loss of a few dozen dead tankers. On the scale of WW2, not a loss rate worth mentioning. However the troops were doing it, they were doing it. It may not have been the simplest, preferred method from the perspective of the individual tank crew, but it was working very nicely from the perspective of folks tasked with commanding the fighting from A to B, most of whom probably didn’t realize that the ‘special techniques’ were necessary, so why rock the boat? Hence you have this sort of dissociation between the crews facing the tanks, and everyone else. Both sides have their points.